Men in Black Read Free Page B

longer than he should have. In 1969, he suffered a stroke, “resulting in a partial loss of memory.” 16 His health troubles became worse. “In late March 1971, he started having acute pain in his left ear and a chronic headache over his eye and in the back of his head. Aspirin did not help. He found it more difficult to concentrate. His short-term memory was waning. He would latch onto some event of long ago and reminisce. In conference he began to stumble badly, becoming tired and confused, and unable to remember which case was being discussed.” 17
    Black’s mental decline seemed to lead to paranoia in the months before his resignation and death. “Black was paranoid about the future, expressing fears of governmental collapse; Nixon was preparing a military coup, he said. ‘Anything can happen here. We have small groups fragmenting the government. There may not be a 1972 election—a dictator might take over.’” 18
     
    Felix Frankfurter
    Frankfurter was appointed by Franklin Roosevelt in 1939. He helped launch the career of the notorious spy Alger Hiss. Frankfurter had been a prominent professor at Harvard Law School. Before joining the Court, he had great influence in getting his law students prestigious clerkships for Supreme Court justices. A notable clerk he obtained for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was a student named Alger Hiss. At Frankfurter’s urging, Hiss began a public service career that included service as a delegate to the Yalta Conference, where FDR, Churchill, and Stalin set the boundaries of postwar Europe. Hiss would later be named by Whittaker Chambers as a spy for the Soviet Union. He was tried for perjury, and Frankfurter, in an unprecedented move for a sitting Supreme Court justice, served as a character witness for Hiss at the trial, as did Associate Justice Stanley Reed, another FDR appointee. 19 Although Frankfurter obviously would not have known of Hiss’s eventual ties to the Soviet Union as a Communist spy, he knew of the specific charges when he decided to lend the prestige of his high position to Hiss’s defense.
    In Brown v. Board of Education , Frankfurter behaved in a manner that most legal ethicists would consider extremely troubling. He collaborated with a former clerk, Philip Elman, who was serving in the solicitor general’s office in the Executive Branch. (That’s the office that represents the administration’s position before the Court.) Frankfurter passed confidential information on to Elman about the positions of his fellow justices in Brown , and advised him on arguments the government should make to sway the Court. 20
     
    William O. Douglas
    FDR appointed Douglas in 1939. In a particularly bizarre episode, Douglas met a flight attendant on a plane and invited her to visit him at the Court, where he allegedly physically assaulted her.
     
    Just a short time after she had entered Douglas’s chambers, though, members of the staff began hearing strange sounds from inside—shouts, banging furniture, and running feet. A short time later, the office door flew open and out rushed the young woman, her face all flushed and her clothing badly disheveled, shouting at the startled office staff how outraged and disgusted she was. Douglas, she said, had chased her around his desk, grabbing at her clothes and demanding that they go to a motel immediately for a sexual liaison. 21
     
    Douglas’s marriages to young women and his subsequent divorces created financial hardship for him, so he sought income to supplement his Court salary. One significant source of income while he was on the bench came from a questionable source:
     
    Newspaper reports had established that over the years Douglas had received $101,000 from the foundation of Albert Parvin. Parvin was the former co-owner of the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas and a business associate of Meyer Lansky, “Ice Pick Willie” Alderman, and others not usually placed within the category of “nice Jewish boys.” 22
     
    In his